New Food Network show to feature Utah cookie bakery

The Baking Hive, a Utah bakery that specializes in large-scale cookie creations, will be the focus on a new Food Network show debuting Saturday, August 5.

Crazy Cookie Builds will follow The Baking Hive, led by head chef Elisa Barber, as it looks to put together these custom cookie creations. The show will air on the Cooking Channel, which is a spin-off of the Food Network.

The bakery was chosen for the show after its works were discovered on social media by a production company. Barber and her staff were approached with the idea and they agreed to it. Barber was skeptical initially. “I thought it was a scam at first,” she says.

Episode one is scheduled to air Saturday, Aug. 5 at 8 p.m. EST on the Cooking Channel, and will air several times over the following weeks. In the first episode, The Baking Hive will build a replica of Rice-Eccles Stadium for University of Utah football coach Kyle Whittingham and a 10-foot tall schoolhouse for William Penn Elementary in Salt Lake City.

“(Building large edible creations) is probably the most stressful thing I’ve ever done, but then to see pure joy from children, you’re just like, ‘This is why we do it. Look how happy people are,’” Barber says. “So it makes it worth all the stress, all the broken gingerbread, all the redos, the lack of sleep and starvation.”

A second episode that was filmed will be a holiday special tentatively scheduled to run in November and air throughout the holidays.

The Baking Hive opened just a few years ago, when Barber returned to her home state after attending culinary school in Ireland.